Birgit M. Kaiser (NYU)
The Two Floors of Thinking – The Aesthetics of Deleuze’s The Fold
To what extent can Deleuze’s The Fold be called part of his aesthetic theory, or what is
the aesthetic specificity about the fold? The Fold is not merely a contribution to the
Baroque, but offers a genuine reconsideration of the cornerstones upon which aesthetic
thinking has been built after its rise as a theory with Kant’s First and Third Critique, and
with the proliferation of aesthetics in the 19th century. The two main contributions of The
Fold to such reconsiderations are, first, that the fold as a figure of movement undercuts
the static separation traditionally assumed in aesthetics between form and matter, and
thereby reformulates this aesthetic question par excellence. It departs from thinking along
the lines of a mold, into which a matter is formed according to resemblance, and instead
suggests thinking the relation between form and matter as one of continuous, productive
modulation. Second, and corresponding to the first, such continuous modulation (beyond
its more directly meta-formalistic aesthetics relating to the arts) presupposes the
specifically ‘baroque’ arrangement of what Deleuze calls with Leibniz “only two floors,
separated by a fold that echoes itself, arching from the two sides according to a different
order” (29). In order for a continuous modulation to be feasible (and in order for it to
happen on a plane of immanence and not lose itself in an infinite number of (Platonic)
floors and transcendental heights), the relation between the two floors has to be one of
coexistence or “a higher analogy” (ibid), rather than one of hierarchy, separation and
linear development. My paper will focus on this specific relation between the two floors,
and will argue that such an analogy becomes aesthetically pertinent, and is the pertinent
reformulation of the aesthetic at the same time, when Deleuze persistently relates it to
‘perception in the folds’, that is to the coexistence of body and soul. Leibniz’ critique of
Descartes’ hierarchical categories of ideas (obscure, confused, distinct and clear ideas, of
which according to Descartes only clear ideas can be called thinking) led the former to
postulate a continuity of these ideas, and the fold as the expression of their relation. Such
continuity does not – and that is the crucial point of the fold – lead to an addition of
confused ideas to more compound clear ideas, but does precisely allow for their
separation “by a fold that echoes itself, arching from the two sides according to a
different order”. Their separation into confused perceptions and clear apperceptions
according to Leibniz thus produces two sides of thinking rather than discriminate one
against the other. As a reader of Leibniz, Alexander Baumgarten – the ‘founder’ of
philosophical aesthetics – took precisely the idea of such folded continuity for his claim
of an analogon rationis, the claim of an analogy between thinking that pertains to the
body (aisthesis) and thinking that pertains to the mind. Deleuze’s consideration of
Leibniz thus connects us with an aesthetics that was buried under subjectivist aesthetics
in the wake of Kant. And in correspondence to his works on Bergson and Bacon, Deleuze
claims that, certainly “according to a different order,” there are two modes of thinking,
and a reformulated aesthetics might be the field of their articulation.